When we left Aisling O’Dowd (Seána Kerslake) and Danielle Mullane (Nika McGuigan) at the end of Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope’s first season, they were suffering from the Me Without You effect of a cancerous friendship that long ago needed to be excised. Except that Aisling, the more codependent and reckless of the two, did not want the conjoined twin-like dynamic between her and Danielle to ever end. The idea that Danielle could dream of leaving Dublin in favor of “self-exploration” through a study abroad program in Vancouver is enough to send her on a bender unlike any she’s ever embarked upon. Only for Danielle to have to be the one to come pick her up at the Garda station. This serves as the second to last straw before Danielle finally has the revelation that their friendship has reached an irrevocable impasse… of course, if that were truly the case, there wouldn’t be a season two.
As Danielle begins to navigate her new life in a foreign country, Aisling has been forced back to the last place she ever wanted to return to: Mallow. There, she works at a cash loan place where “a certain element” is known for coming in. Like Amber (Emma Willis), who has no shame about rolling up and asking for another “home improvement” loan despite not having paid back her most recent one. As Aisling gets to talking to her about how Danielle won’t respond to any of her messages on any medium, Amber lords it over Aisling that her cousin, Austin (Seán Óg Cairns), has been hanging out quite a bit with Danielle in Vancouver as he himself pursues a “full degree.” Begging Amber to ask Austin for Danielle’s new number, she only agrees to do so in exchange for two hundred euros. This price to pay for attempting to renew her soul mate connection comes at a rather inconvenient time, as Aisling is desperately trying to get another lodging situation in Dublin so she can get the fuck out of Mallow.
Meanwhile, in Vancouver, things for Danielle are off to a rocky start. First, in terms of finding an apartment without a landlord reference thanks to Aisling leaving their living space in disarray upon departing after Danielle, and then when it comes to the partner she’s assigned for the entirety of the semester, Santana (Annabell Rickerby). Uppity, self-superior and, in short, a complete cunt, Santana makes it known from the outset that she’s going to ruin any shred of joy Danielle might get from her “art studies.” Even so, she still hasn’t reached the crescendo of loneliness and being misunderstood required to go back to Aisling, still telling her when she finally gets the number to call, “You are like a scar that won’t fade.”
Danielle’s commitment to carving out her own identity remains firm, stemming from season one, when her art teacher informed her of her work, “I have absolutely no sense of who you are by looking at this.” It’s a moment very akin to what was happening to Rachael Leigh Cook as Laney Boggs in She’s All That, and, like Laney, Danielle does find her inspiration–in choosing to depict her life of debauchery with Aisling. And so, you could say that she is her “toxicity muse.” Toxic, sure, but still a muse. Without her, Danielle seems to be flailing artistically again, and mocked by Santana for her frothy use of pigment that will, at best, land her a job at United Colors of Benetton.
As Danielle is hurt by Santana’s treatment, Aisling refuses to be hurt by Danielle’s, taking it as a challenge to finally get her shit together (a phrase oft repeated throughout the series)–being in her late twenties and all, and not having the same youth as her sister, Rachel (Hannah Sheehan), in order to make being a trainwreck “endearing.” By episode three, “Whatsappening,” Aisling really has started to get her shit together, securing a new job at another financial asset company and having moved in with her ex-coworker, the freaky deaky, super OCD Lorraine (Sheila Moylette). Expanding upon her character’s bizarreness from season one, Preissner sees fit to imbue Lorraine with the running gag of constantly disappearing out of nowhere, leading Aisling and her other roommate/new best friend, Joe (Peter Campion), to ponder just what kind of secret life she has.
As Aisling gets deeper and deeper into the gay club scene with Joe (not that it’s exactly “robust” in Dublin), she encounters Ferg (Muiris Crowley) there, kissing another man. It’s certainly shocking enough to warrant contacting Danielle about it, who, rather than being upset with Aisling for breaking the news to her, is simply upset that the guy she thought she had been “sort of seeing” is gay. This leads them to start talking more openly with one another again, the floodgate to their respective and unwitting hard-ons for drama being opened anew–and knowing full well that it is only each other who they can count on for sympathy in feeling persecuted by the world for simply being themselves. It is also Aisling who gives Danielle the courage to try throwing a party as an icebreaker to perhaps make more friends–an attempt that backfires when Santana proves to have control over the entire art department’s actions so as to make Danielle a party of one, save for Austin, always there when she needs him, yet still not enough. Indeed, both Aisling and Danielle tellingly choose men as substitute “friendship partners,” both because no other female can fill that void and because they have decidedly big dick energy that needs another “more femme” male to dominate.
Now talking regularly about their respective problems, Aisling adds to the list her new workplace romance issues, including Keith (Patrick Ball), the pervy man-whore who serves as the version 2.0 of Lorcan (Adam Devereux), and her boss, Ryan (Lochlann O’Mearáin), who seems to be giving her mixed signals about his interest in her. And as her sister starts to come into her own as a hot mess, she ends up calling Aisling at work for help: she needs the morning after pill. “You’re going to get pregnant at the same time as mam!” Aisling warns Rachel in season one’s fourth episode, “Mallowfania.” She’s not that far off the mark.
As for Taxi Good (Steve Blount), because the show now takes place at a point in time when Uber finally became unignorable in Dublin (a rather long holdout city), we’re offered the narrative thread of his livelihood about to come to an end. Yet he’s still there to provide wisdom to a lone Aisling, just as he once did to both of them. Like the way he told Danielle in season one, “You can’t have a weak link in a short chain.” It was laden with double meaning, of course (for that’s Preissner’s modus operandi with this story), and stated on the drive back from the Wicklow Mountains, where Aisling arbitrarily decided it would be a good idea to take a day trip as a means to get Danielle to like her again. Season two again showcases Aisling bending over backwards to get Danielle to see that they’re made for each other, yet at the halfway point there is a flipping of the script, and it seems at last Danielle is the one who turns needier and more codependent.
While obsessing over proving that she can “get her shit together,” Aisling slowly grows accustomed to her metamorphosis without Danielle in the mix. As Danielle once told her, after all, Aisling merely needs people as distractions, and Joe serves as her confidant of the moment.
Regardless, when Danielle does inevitably come crawling back, Aisling is happy to make room for her in her “new” life and they quickly return to their old habits. This means a blatant defiance of Lorraine’s house rules in allowing Danielle to stay there as though she’s paying (and even Aisling isn’t paying). Running into Lorraine at a restaurant where Aisling and Danielle finally realize what she’s been sneaking off to do–volunteer to teach language lessons–it is quite telling when the duo can only look at her strangely as she explains, “The benefits of volunteering, for me, are threefold: it stops loneliness, develops emotional stability and it makes observable differences in the lives of others.” Aisling and Danielle continue to regard her oddly, with Aisling concluding, in a moment of Carrie Bradshaw narcissism, “Shopping develops my emotional stability.”
As the finale, “This Is the End,” reaches its plotline apex, like Cher Horowitz before her, Aisling is still convinced she can talk her way out of anything, which always remains largely true until the last episode. And since this is the bona fide final episode, Aisling is given the rude awakening of being chucked from the apartment by Lorraine in the middle of the night. When she looks over at a drunk Danielle waiting in the hall, she accuses, “This is your fault! I was fine!” The destructive codependency back in action, the two lie down next to one another on a blanket in the hall, finishing a bottle of wine. “Mein kampf es su kampf,” Danielle laughs as she tempts her over. And it’s true. The more rock bottom each one becomes, the more they seem to want to be around the other to commiserate. “This is the end. I thought it’d look different,” Aisling says resignedly while lying in a pile of her scant possessions. It is the most telling scene of millennial existence rendered to screen of late.
She adds, “I don’t know if I love you or hate you.” Danielle asserts, “I love you, like.” Aisling concedes, “I think I’m addicted to you.” So it is that we have the summing up of their ultimate toxicity addiction–and it isn’t alcohol, so much as each other. Even though Aisling tries to make one final go of it at her job, she, naturally, gets fired. And for an instant, she also tries to help Rachel with her current relationship mistakes but then thinks, fuck this, and runs for the train station. “I’ve a lot of questions,” Danielle says to Aisling as she joins her on the train. “This is the answer to all of them,” Aisling replies as she pops open a can of beer. Alcohol, in the end, forever being the force that binds them, and their commitment to blacking out reality. There could be no more perfect conclusion for Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope.
